Why Nothing Your Write is Perfect--And That's Okay
When I was first trying to capture my ideas in stories, I was always stymmied by my own clumsy words, which never sufficed to capture the story in the least. The truth is that my writing ability, my grammar and sentence structure, my knowledge of technical issues like how many words to put in a scene, how to describe setting, how to convey dialog, how to outline a novel and keep at it, until the draft was complete... yes, all that was lacking.
I carried on, which turned out to be the right thing to do. First of all, you can't learn any of the technical bits of writing without writing. But second of all, and most importantly, I learned that I will never capture that perfect novel, that perfect expression of character, that faceted jewel made of words through which the perfect idea shines, because it is as elusive as heaven. It is a dream of perfection, but books are like people, they are imperfect but beloved anyway, because they are real. They can point to something, even if they can't capture it.
C.S. Lewis describes trying to capture elusive "thing," this heaven, this perfection; it can only be a life's journey, it can never be a destination, unless, like heaven itself, it awaits us after death.
“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.
"Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported.
"Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side?
" Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
"You have never had it.
"All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for".
"We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
― The Problem of Pain
Don't wait for perfection to write your story. Accept that each book will fall a little short of the expectation you had of it, but love it like a child, rear it as well as you can, and do your best to make it successful in the world of readers.
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